Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemDeployment of grids through integrated configuration management(ACTA Press, 2008)A Grid environment typically comes into existence when several collaborating institutions contribute resources for researchers to solve problems of mutual interest. Such collaboration of personnel and resources are commonly referred to as a Virtual Organization (VO). The process to establish and manage a VO can be a time consuming and laborious process with installation and configuration of VO specific software and data needed across sites. Configuration management technologies can facilitate this process, however to support the establishment of Grid based VOs, it is necessary to align and integrate Grids and configuration management technologies. This alignment should recognize that sites may have their own flavors of configuration management tools and Grid technologies, and allow VO administrators to seamlessly deploy and configure Grid resources across multiple sites. This paper presents the experiences in developing and testing such an integrated Grid and configuration management framework.
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ItemE-Infrastructures for clinical epidemiological studies across Scotland(International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), 2008)As the proliferation of digital data about individuals increases the opportunities for leveraging this information to benefit society become correspondingly greater. This is especially true in the domain of e-Health where a large number of disparate clinical data resources exist around the world, often housed in individual systems, but with great potential to advance medical and health-care provision if harnessed together and linked with other data resources. In this paper we present a variety of projects that federate such health and other data through re-usable and adaptable e-Infrastructures targeted to the needs of the Scottish and wider e-Research communities. At the heart of all these systems and to counter societies natural wariness of such systems and their use of their personal information are fine grained and adaptable security systems which restrict and enforce access to data to authorised individuals. In this paper we outline these e- Infrastructure architectures, their associated security models and how we are applying them to support epidemiological studies.
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ItemTowards a Virtual Anonymisation Grid for Unified Access to Remote Clinical Data(IOS PRESS, 2008)Grid technologies provide an infrastructure through which, amongst other things, data access and integration is facilitated across highly distributed and heterogeneous resources. Different domains have their own requirements on the nature of this data access and integration. The clinical domain offers arguably the greatest challenges facing the roll-out and adoption of Grid technologies to meet the changing face of post-genomic clinical research, especially with regard to information governance, ethics and hence security solutions. This paper outlines a novel system design for secure anonymous data access and linkage that meets the needs of key stakeholders in this space including end user researchers, data providers and owners and ethical oversight bodies amongst others. We identify how existing solutions developed within the Medical Research Council funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project are being re-factored to meet the needs of these players and to address information governance criteria.
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ItemMulti-level simulations to support nanoCMOS electronics research(International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering, 2009)
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ItemA Shibboleth-protected privilege management infrastructure for e-science education(IEEE Computer Society, 2006)Simplifying access to and usage of large scale compute resources via the grid is of critical importance to encourage the uptake of e-research. Security is one aspect that needs to be made as simple as possible for end users. The ESP-Grid and DyVOSE projects at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow are investigating security technologies which will make the end-user experience of using the grid easier and more secure. In this paper, we outline how simplified (from the user experience) authentication and authorization of users are achieved through single usernames and passwords at users' home institutions. This infrastructure, which will be applied in the second year of the grid computing module part of the advanced MSc in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, combines grid portal technology, the Internet2 Shibboleth Federated Access Control infrastructure, and the PERMS role-based access control technology. Through this infrastructure inter-institutional teaching can be supported where secure access to federated resources is made possible between sites. A key aspect of the work we describe here is the ability to support dynamic delegation of authority whereby local/remote administrators are able to dynamically assign meaningful privileges to remote/local users respectively in a trusted manner thus allowing for the dynamic establishment of virtual organizations with fine grained security at their heart.
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ItemSecure federated data retrieval in clinical trials(ACTA PRESS ANAHEIM, 2006)
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ItemShibboleth-based access to and usage of grid resources(IEEE, 2006)Security underpins grids and e-research. Without a robust, reliable and simple grid security infrastructure combined with commonly accepted security practices, large portions of the research community and wider industry will not engage. The predominant way in which security is currently addressed in the grid community is through public key infrastructures (PKI) based upon X.509 certificates to support authentication. Whilst PKIs address user identity issues, authentication does not provide fine grained control over what users are allowed to do on remote resources (authorization). In this paper we outline how we have successfully combined Shibboleth and advanced authorization technologies to provide simplified (from the user perspective) but fine grained security for access to and usage of grid resources. We demonstrate this approach through different security focused e-science projects being conducted at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow. We believe that this model is widely applicable and encourage the further uptake of e-science by non-IT specialists in the research communities.
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ItemGrid infrastructures for secure access to and use of bioinformatics data: experiences from the BRIDGES project(IEEE Computer Society, 2006)The BRIDGES project was funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to address the needs of cardiovascular research scientists investigating the genetic causes of hypertension as part of the Wellcome Trust funded (£4.34M) cardiovascular functional genomics (CFG) project. Security was at the heart of the BRIDGES project and an advanced data and compute grid infrastructure incorporating latest grid authorisation technologies was developed and delivered to the scientists. We outline these grid infrastructures and describe the perceived security requirements at the project start including data classifications and how these evolved throughout the lifetime of the project. The uptake and adoption of the project results are also presented along with the challenges that must be overcome to support the secure exchange of life science data sets. We also present how we will use the BRIDGES experiences in future projects at the National e-Science Centre.